Best Practice to extend a linux LVM drive on a Centos 7 VM

[thomasross]

I need to extend a linux LVM  drive from 1 TB to 4 TB.  The drive currently has one partition.

Is it better to extend the virtual disk and add a partition? Or should I add another virtual disk and create a partition on the new disk ?

Also, if I used fdisk to create the first partition, can I create the new partition with parted? Or do I need to stay with fdisk ?

Thanks !

Tommy

[continuum]

It does not make a lot of sense to use several partitions inside a VM.

Instead create a single partition for each vmdk - then you can later expand the vmdk without issues.

fdisk is quite old nowadays - it works with MBR-disks but as soon as you use GPT-disks I would suggest to use gdisk instead.

GPT-disks can be expanded upto the nax size that VMware allows - while you cant expand MBRdisks beyond 2TB.

The only disk that uses more than one partition in my VMs is the bootdisk with an additional EFIpartition and a swap-partition.

[thomasross]

Thank you very much. But I am not sure I understand your answer.

I have a 1 TB vdisk (vmdk) and have a linux partition using all the space available with one vol group and one LVM

Can you point me to an article that explains how to  expand the vmdk and use  that space to expand the LVM without creating another partition?

THANK YOU!

Thomasross